Re: Reconsidering the work flow and how the SCM system fits in

[Koen Kooi <koen@dominion.kabel.utwente.nl>]

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Paul Sokolovsky schreef:
| Esben Haabendal <EsbenHaabendal@gmail.com> wrote:

|> For OE to really reach it's potential we have to be able add even more
|> features while at the same time delivering stable releases/branches
|> for distro and product developers to work from.
|>
|> When Joe-average-embedded-product-developer comes along, shopping for
|> which embedded Linux tool to use for his embedded product, he really
|> should be able to checkout a stable version of OE and be able to
|> build a toolchain and a simple image for all supported targets. And
|> this is certainly not the situation right now.
|
| Typical mistake. There's stable branch in OE, and based on the
| experience with the previous branches, best-practices change control
| procedure was applied to it. Now, based on 2.5 month existence of that
| branch, I have following observations:
|
| 1. People don't know about that branch.
| 2. Once made known, people still pretend that there's none, and
| continue to complain about stability.
| 3. Most of the rest of people don't put slightest effort into
| maintenance of that branch.
| 4. Those who try, complain that the change control procedure is ...
| complex! But it is only a separate branch + pre-review of changes + "all
| changes are merged from main branch" rule of thumb.

| Having more branches is not going to help with this at all.

There's a false assumption in the above: not all branches will be stable
branches. They will be more like the avr32 branch stelios and I used, so
people will work on implementing a feature in a branch (e.g. sysroot
support), merge it back (with history!) and forget about that branch.

But I still don't think switching scm will improve our 'branch
situation', I think we'll end up with the same old complaints, but this
time about git/hg instead of mtn. I've seen a flat-out refusal to read
mtn docs from several OE developers, who also are the most vocal about
mtn sucking[1]. If we don't fix that attitude we'll keep switching scms
ad infinitum.

And we really should start using something like
http://www.review-board.org/ to review big changes that are too small
for a branch.

regards,

Koen

[1] incidentally most of those people come from a long period of cvs usage
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